There is a familiar problem with television programmes about the history of life: dinosaurs tend to steal the show. The fossil record, however, is considerably stranger and more interesting than a succession of tyrannosaurs, velociraptors and sauropods. Surviving Earth, an eight-part 2026 series produced by Tim Haines (the creative force behind Walking with Dinosaurs) takes a much broader view. Spanning roughly 450 million years, the series examines eight major episodes of environmental upheaval and extinction, using individual animals and their families to tell the story of how life responds when the planet changes dramatically. The result is part palaeontology documentary, part natural-history drama and part evolutionary epic. Its great strength, viewed through the eyes of an biologist, is that extinction is not presented simply as a succession of disasters. Instead, each catastrophe becomes an evolutionary filter: some organisms disappear, others survive, and the descendants of the survivors inherit a world radically different from the one that existed before. The series consequently asks a more interesting question than simply ‘what killed the dinosaurs?’ It asks why did some forms of life survive when others did not, and what happened to evolution afterwards? To me, that is one of its greatest strengths. Just a heads up, there are spoilers below but I have left out specific species names as to not spoil everything, so carry on with trepidation wary traveller.

That perspective makes the title Surviving Earth particularly appropriate. The series is not really about individual species ‘fighting’ extinction in the anthropomorphic sense; it is about populations persisting through environmental change, with evolutionary consequences that can reverberate for millions of years. Each episode takes a particular ecological crisis and builds a narrative around animals living through it. The episodes cover the Late Permian “Great Dying”, the climatic upheaval of the Late Triassic, the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous, the collapse of marine ecosystems during the Cretaceous, major forest disruption in the Carboniferous, Ordovician environmental change, the ecological consequences of the collision of North and South America, and the late Quaternary extinction of megafauna. The official episode descriptions emphasise animals rather than abstract geological processes: a gorgonopsid protecting its family, a young herd animal growing into a leader, dinosaurs enduring the darkness following the asteroid, a marine reptile searching for food, an amphibian protecting its eggs, an early fish seeking a mate, elephants crossing a changing continent and a giant bear struggling to raise its cubs. It is an effective storytelling strategy because evolutionary biology is ultimately about populations of organisms living, reproducing and interacting with their environments.

The first episode, When the Earth Burned, is perhaps the most obvious place to begin an evolutionary-biological assessment. It examines the end-Permian mass extinction around 252 million years ago, when enormous volcanic eruptions associated with the Siberian Traps drove profound climatic and environmental changes. Rising temperatures, altered atmospheric chemistry, acidification and declining oxygen contributed to the most severe mass extinction in the Phanerozoic. The episode follows gorgonopsians against this increasingly hostile background. These extraordinary therapsids are particularly appropriate protagonists because they are neither conventional reptiles nor mammals: they belong to the evolutionary lineage that ultimately leads towards mammals, providing a reminder that the evolutionary tree does not divide neatly into the familiar categories we use today. The Great Dying is fascinating precisely because it demonstrates that evolution does not operate in isolation from geology and climate. Natural selection may favour particular characteristics under ordinary circumstances, but a sufficiently rapid environmental transformation can render previously successful adaptations irrelevant. An animal can be extremely well adapted to its environment and still disappear when the environment itself changes beyond the range to which its lineage can respond. This distinction between adaptation and adaptability runs throughout the series. The evolutionary history of life is not simply a story of organisms becoming progressively better adapted. It is a history of populations repeatedly encountering environments that change in ways that are sometimes predictable, sometimes gradual and sometimes catastrophically abrupt. The gorgonopsids also provide an excellent illustration of evolutionary contingency. They were among the dominant terrestrial predators before the end-Permian extinction, but their lineage ultimately disappeared. Their extinction did not represent evolutionary failure in any meaningful sense. They had occupied ecosystems successfully for millions of years. Their disappearance instead opened ecological opportunities for other groups, including archosaur lineages that would eventually give rise to dinosaurs and their relatives. Extinction is therefore both destructive and creative in evolutionary terms: it removes lineages while simultaneously altering competitive environments and creating opportunities for survivors.

Episode two titled When the Climate Broke moves into the Late Triassic and examines an episode of extreme climatic instability associated with the Carnian Pluvial Episode. Here, the series shifts from the spectacular violence of volcanic catastrophe towards a world transformed by prolonged climatic disruption. The episode follows a young animal growing towards adulthood and becoming a leader of its herd, allowing the programme to explore how environmental instability affects behaviour, reproduction and survival. This is one of the places where Surviving Earth is strongest conceptually. Evolutionary biology is sometimes presented as though natural selection acts only on obvious anatomical features, teeth, claws, limbs or body size. In reality, behaviour can be an important component of fitness. Where an animal lives, how it moves through a landscape, when it reproduces, how it interacts with conspecifics and how it responds to environmental stress can all affect survival and reproductive success. The episode therefore opens a window onto behavioural ecology in deep time. Of course, there is a fundamental limitation: behaviour does not fossilise readily. Palaeontologists have to infer much of it from anatomy, trace fossils, nesting sites, herd associations and comparisons with living relatives. When a programme depicts prehistoric animals displaying highly specific social behaviours, an evolutionary biologist should therefore distinguish between what is strongly supported by evidence and what is plausible reconstruction. This is a recurring issue throughout the series. The filmmakers have reportedly worked with hundreds of scientists, while acknowledging that reconstructions necessarily involve uncertainty. The result should not be regarded as a literal recording of prehistoric behaviour. Instead, it is a scientifically informed hypothesis presented in dramatic form.

The third episode, When the Asteroid Fell is perhaps the series’ most familiar story but also one of its most powerful. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck near what is now Chicxulub in Mexico, producing an environmental catastrophe that eliminated roughly three-quarters of species, including all non-avian dinosaurs (much to my dismay). The episode focuses not on the moment of impact alone but on the prolonged aftermath, following a pair of dinosaurs attempting to survive a world plunged into darkness. The official synopsis describes an extraordinary 30-year period of darkness, emphasising the prolonged ecological consequences rather than treating the impact as a single instantaneous event. This is excellent evolutionary storytelling because the asteroid itself was not the only problem. The evolutionary consequences arose through a cascade of ecological effects: atmospheric debris reduced sunlight, plant productivity collapsed, food webs were disrupted and climatic conditions changed. In other words, mass extinction operates through ecological networks. The asteroid did not simply kill individual dinosaurs; it destabilised the ecosystems on which they depended. This distinction is crucial. Extinction is often imagined as a direct relationship between a catastrophe and a species. In reality, environmental change can propagate through food webs. Herbivores depend on plants; carnivores depend on herbivores; scavengers depend on carcasses; decomposers depend on organic material. Disrupt one level and consequences can travel through the ecosystem. The episode also reinforces one of the central lessons of evolutionary history: survival does not necessarily favour the strongest animal. Following the K–Pg event, many of the largest terrestrial vertebrates disappeared, while comparatively small mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and other organisms survived. The descendants of those survivors inherited ecological opportunities that had previously been occupied by dinosaurs. Within a few million years, mammals underwent major diversification.

One of the most interesting episodes is episode 4 titled When the Seas Died, which moves the focus away from terrestrial animals and into a marine ecosystem undergoing severe environmental stress. The episode follows a giant marine reptile searching for food for her unborn offspring before giving birth during a super-hurricane. The marine setting is particularly welcome. Popular palaeontology programmes have historically concentrated heavily on terrestrial vertebrates, especially dinosaurs. Yet the oceans contain much of the evolutionary history of complex life, and marine extinction events can be every bit as consequential as those on land. From an evolutionary perspective, marine environments provide an excellent opportunity to consider how temperature, oxygen availability, ocean chemistry and productivity influence biodiversity. Marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and mosasaurs were highly specialised members of Mesozoic ecosystems, but specialisation can become a vulnerability when environmental conditions change rapidly. The episode also illustrates the importance of reproduction in understanding extinction. An adult animal surviving an environmental crisis is not necessarily enough. A population must maintain recruitment. Eggs must hatch, juveniles must survive and individuals must reach reproductive maturity. Evolutionary biologists therefore tend to think in terms of population viability, not simply individual survival. That distinction gives the series its emotional force. The mother is not simply trying to stay alive; she is carrying the next generation. The survival of a lineage depends on whether reproduction can continue under altered environmental conditions.

The fifth episode When the Forests Collapsed is particularly interesting from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist because it places an amphibian at the centre of a major ecological crisis (finally!). A mother amphibian attempts to keep her eggs in water while the surrounding forest dries out and collapses. Amphibians are superb indicators of environmental change in the modern world because many have permeable skin, complex life cycles and strong associations with freshwater. Their eggs and larvae can be particularly vulnerable to changes in moisture and water availability. The episode therefore provides an excellent opportunity to consider how apparently modest environmental changes can create biological thresholds. For an evolutionary biologist, the concept of ecological thresholds is particularly important. A gradual reduction in rainfall does not necessarily produce a gradual decline in population fitness. There may be a point at which breeding pools disappear, food becomes unavailable or physiological stress becomes too great. At that point, population decline can become abrupt. This is highly relevant to contemporary conservation biology. Climate change does not simply move average temperatures upwards; it can alter seasonality, rainfall, extreme events and the availability of critical habitats. The fossil record provides numerous examples of organisms being confronted with comparable environmental disruptions, although the rates, mechanisms and biological contexts differ. The amphibian episode therefore has an unexpected contemporary resonance. The story is set millions of years ago, but the underlying biological question: how does an organism reproduce when the environment supporting its life cycle disappears? This is one that conservation biologists continue to confront today.

Moving onto episode six, When the Oceans Shrank goes even further back, to an ancient world in which early fishes inhabited marine ecosystems undergoing dramatic environmental transformation. The official synopsis follows an early fish travelling across the ocean to find a mate before its colourful reef is destroyed by freezing waters. Again, the programme cleverly turns a geological process into an individual story but the evolutionary significance is much broader. The episode asks how organisms respond when geographical ranges and habitats change. This brings dispersal into the evolutionary equation. A species can respond to environmental change in several ways: tolerate the new conditions, adapt genetically across generations, move into suitable habitat, alter its behaviour, or disappear. The capacity to disperse can therefore be a major determinant of survival. For fishes living in changing marine environments, geographical connectivity can be particularly important. Reef systems can disappear while suitable habitat persists elsewhere. Populations capable of moving may survive; isolated populations may not. The episode is therefore a useful illustration of why evolutionary biology cannot be separated from biogeography. Evolution happens in space as well as time.

Perhaps the most unexpected episode is When the Continents Collided, which if you can count is the seventh episode which turns to the formation of the Isthmus of Panama and the consequent Great American Biotic Interchange. The episode follows a matriarch elephant leading her herd into a changing landscape as North and South America become connected. This is fascinating because the event demonstrates how geological change can directly reorganise evolution. When the continents became connected, animals that had evolved independently on the two landmasses gained access to new territories. Predators, herbivores and competitors moved between continents, dramatically altering ecosystems. This is evolution operating on a geographical scale. The episode is also a useful corrective to the idea that evolution is always a response to climate. Geography matters enormously. Mountain ranges, rivers, islands, land bridges and continental movements determine which populations can encounter one another. The Great American Biotic Interchange also provides a superb example of ecological competition. Some immigrant groups thrived; others disappeared. South American mammals encountered North American predators and herbivores, while North American lineages moved south. The resulting extinction and diversification patterns demonstrate that evolution is not simply about producing adaptations; it is about interactions between organisms. The choice of an elephant relative rather than a more obvious sabre-toothed cat is especially welcome. It reflects the series’ willingness to look beyond the standard prehistoric celebrity cast and explore less familiar evolutionary stories.

Okay, onto the final episode, When America Flooded which brings the series into the Pleistocene and the extinction of giant mammals. A mother bear and her cubs face an increasingly difficult environment as the Ice Age transforms North America. This episode is particularly important because it brings the viewer close to the present day. These are not animals separated from us by hundreds of millions of years. Their extinction occurred during the period when humans were spreading across the planet. That immediately complicates the series’ central theme. Unlike the ancient extinctions, the late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions cannot simply be treated as consequences of geological catastrophe. Climate change, habitat alteration, human hunting and their interactions are all implicated to varying degrees in different regions and taxa. From the viewpoint of evolution, this is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of Surviving Earth. The series repeatedly demonstrates that life has survived enormous environmental catastrophes, but the resilience of life should not be confused with the resilience of individual species. Life will survive. That does not mean every species will. This is a crucial distinction for modern conservation. The Earth does not need humans to ‘save life’. Evolutionary processes will continue whether Homo sapiens survives or not. What conservation seeks to conserve is the extraordinary diversity of lineages, ecosystems, processes and evolutionary histories that exist now.

The series’ greatest scientific achievement is its treatment of extinction as an evolutionary process rather than simply an ending. Mass extinction is obviously destructive. But evolutionary history cannot be understood without it. The disappearance of dominant groups creates ecological opportunities. Survivors diversify. Ecosystems reorganise. New evolutionary trajectories become possible. The dinosaurs provide perhaps the best example. The extinction of non-avian dinosaurs did not end their evolutionary story; birds survived. Nor did the end-Cretaceous extinction represent an isolated ‘failure’ of dinosaurs. It transformed the evolutionary landscape in which mammals subsequently diversified. Similarly, the end-Permian extinction dramatically altered terrestrial and marine ecosystems, helping establish the conditions from which Mesozoic ecosystems eventually emerged. This is why the title Surviving Earth is more profound than it first appears. The planet itself is remarkably persistent. Life is extraordinarily resilient at the broadest scale. However, evolutionary history is written in the balance between extinction and diversification.

The major caveat of the series is the inevitable gap between fossil evidence and cinematic reconstruction. The animals in Surviving Earth look remarkably convincing. Much of the filming reportedly uses real-world locations, with digitally created animals integrated into those environments. The approach deliberately recalls Walking with Dinosaurs, but with modern visual-effects technology. However, realism should not be confused with certainty. We can reconstruct the approximate size, anatomy and locomotion of many extinct animals with considerable confidence. We can infer diet from teeth, jaws and gut contents. We can infer habitat from sedimentology and associated fossils. We can sometimes infer sociality from trackways, nesting sites or bonebeds. But we cannot know exactly what an individual gorgonopsid felt, whether a particular animal formed a lifelong pair bond, precisely how a mother responded to a threat, or whether two individuals communicated in the manner depicted. This is not a criticism unique to Surviving Earth. It is an unavoidable problem for any palaeontological documentary that attempts to transform incomplete evidence into a coherent narrative. Indeed, the series deserves credit for recognising this uncertainty. Tim Haines and the production team have emphasised the role of scientific advice and the fact that reconstructions are informed interpretations rather than direct observations. The important thing is for viewers to recognise where evidence ends and reconstruction begins.

The series’ other potential weakness is also one of its strengths: it makes prehistoric animals into characters. We are encouraged to care about parents, offspring, mates and individuals struggling against environmental catastrophe. This is an effective way of communicating science. Viewers understand evolutionary concepts more readily when they are embedded in a story. This there is an evolutionary danger in this approach. Natural selection does not have foresight. Evolution does not ‘want’ the mosasaur family to survive. The Earth is not testing animals to see which ones are worthy. There is no evolutionary narrative in which the strongest species inevitably wins. Real evolution is messier. Chance matters. Historical contingency matters. Genetic drift matters. Founder effects matter. Extinction can be random with respect to adaptation. A perfectly competent lineage can disappear simply because its range overlaps the location of a catastrophe. Surviving Earth sometimes inevitably simplifies this complexity in favour of drama. Yet the underlying message remains surprisingly close to evolutionary thinking: survival depends upon the interaction between organism, environment, chance and history.

That is enough moaning for the minute. Perhaps the most impressive feature of Surviving Earth is the range of organisms it presents. Gorgonopsians, marine reptiles, early fishes, amphibians, giant mammals and other less familiar creatures receive substantial attention alongside dinosaurs. Contemporary reviews have particularly praised the series for moving beyond the familiar prehistoric celebrity species. This matters because evolutionary biology is fundamentally about diversity. Dinosaurs are fascinating, but they represent only one branch of the tree of life. To understand the history of life properly, viewers need to encounter therapsids, amphibians, early vertebrates, marine reptiles, arthropods, mammals and countless other groups. The series therefore succeeds where many palaeontology documentaries struggle: it makes evolutionary history feel genuinely diverse. There is inevitably a contemporary message running beneath Surviving Earth. The series explicitly connects past environmental crises with today’s environmental changes, while also emphasising a crucial difference: humans are the first species known to have the capacity to understand the scale of our own impact. This is where the evolutionary biologist’s perspective becomes particularly important. This is undertaken with a short segment at the end of each episode which I feel is extremely impactful. It is tempting to argue that because life has survived previous mass extinctions, the current biodiversity crisis is simply another episode in Earth’s long history. That conclusion would be profoundly misleading. The fact that life survived the Permian–Triassic extinction does not make the loss of biodiversity unimportant. It means that ecosystems and evolutionary lineages were transformed beyond recognition. Survival of life is a very low bar. Humans depend upon a particular biological world: pollinators, soils, forests, fisheries, microorganisms, freshwater ecosystems and thousands of other species and interactions. Evolution will continue after individual species disappear, but human societies cannot simply assume that ecological services will persist unchanged.

Viewed purely as a piece of television, Surviving Earth is an impressive achievement. It is visually spectacular, emotionally engaging and unusually ambitious in its chronological scope. But its greatest value lies in its decision to make extinction and survival the organising principles of the story of life. Rather than treating Earth’s history as a parade of prehistoric animals, it presents a dynamic planet in which climate, geology, geography and biology continually interact. From an evolutionary biologist’s perspective, the series is at its best when it shows that organisms do not evolve in a vacuum. They evolve in ecosystems, within landscapes, among competitors, predators, prey and parasites, and under physical conditions that can change dramatically. Evolution is therefore not simply the history of adaptation. It is the history of organisms encountering changing environments and populations either persisting, moving, adapting or disappearing. Its portrayal of extinction is particularly effective. The Permian–Triassic extinction demonstrates the vulnerability of even dominant groups; the Cretaceous–Paleogene event shows how a geological catastrophe can reorganise entire ecosystems; the changing oceans and forests demonstrate the importance of habitat and climate; the formation of the Isthmus of Panama reveals the evolutionary consequences of geographical connectivity; and the Pleistocene demonstrates that extinction has continued into the period of human expansion.

The series is also commendably broad in its choice of protagonists. Gorgonopsians, amphibians, early fishes, marine reptiles and giant mammals are given opportunities to tell evolutionary stories that might otherwise remain buried in specialist literature. That makes Surviving Earth an excellent introduction to the idea that the history of life is much stranger and richer than the familiar dinosaur narrative. There are, inevitably, scientific compromises. The reconstruction of prehistoric behaviour necessarily involves speculation, and the emotional narratives sometimes make evolution appear more purposeful than it really is. A scientifically literate viewer should therefore resist taking every behavioural detail as established fact. But this is a relatively small price to pay for a series that succeeds in communicating something genuinely important about evolutionary history. Ultimately, Surviving Earth is not really a story about how individual animals survived disasters. It is a story about how evolutionary history emerges from disaster. Every extinction removes possibilities; every survivor carries a fragment of the past into a changed world; every subsequent radiation creates new forms that could not have existed in quite the same way before. The living world is therefore the product not only of successful adaptation but also of repeated loss. That is the lesson I would most want biology students to take from the series. When we look at a modern ecosystem, we are not seeing the inevitable outcome of evolution. We are seeing one temporary arrangement produced by an extraordinary sequence of historical accidents, environmental changes, extinctions, migrations and evolutionary innovations. The elephant, frog, shark, bird or human standing before us is the survivor of a lineage that has navigated an almost unimaginably long history of environmental change.

That makes the title especially appropriate. Earth has survived, but so have its evolutionary possibilities. The planet’s history is one of repeated catastrophe followed by recovery, diversification and ecological reinvention. The reassuring message is that life is remarkably persistent. The sobering message is that individual species and ecosystems are not. For evolutionary biologists, that distinction is the central lesson of Surviving Earth, and it is what makes this much more than another prehistoric-animal documentary. If you’ve seen the series, what was your favourite episode?

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